


Everything happens so much

by orphan_account



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Experimental Style, M/M, Mutually Unrequited, Pre-Series, Repetitive Text
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-26
Updated: 2015-08-26
Packaged: 2018-04-17 09:45:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4662039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Richard and Big Head bond over @Horse_ebooks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything happens so much

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to tumblr user daisiestdaisy who, in reply to a post of mine about Big Head and @Horse_ebooks, suggested that "Everything happens so much" would make a great fic title.

_[Everything happens so much](https://twitter.com/horse_ebooks/status/218439593240956928) _

is what Big Head and Richard liked to say to each other. Maybe Richard had just finished fixing something in his code, only to be greeted by two new bugs. Maybe Big Head had dropped his Hooli ID card down a manhole again. On occasions like these, one would always turn to the other with a flat expression and say, _“Everything happens so much.”_

It was just some garbled nonsense from this twitter bot, @Horse_ebooks, that both of them followed at the time. Almost all their catchphrases were borrowed, like from  _Homestar Runner_  or  _The Simpsons_  or  _Achewood._  They had cobbled together an idioglossia, a twin language, out of all their favorite references and inside jokes. It was nice to have a stable of stock phrases, to recycle conversational scripts—a bastion of predictability when everything was suddenly happening so very much.

_[It s just been an unknown idea… almost… a blasphemy… something](https://twitter.com/horse_ebooks/status/221399417889099776) _

The way Richard saw it, his mind had two main levels of conscious thought. The first level was reserved for declarative, fully-formed thoughts. If thinking on this level was equivalent to speaking out loud, thinking on the second level was more like whispering into a cup or mumbling to yourself while lying face down on the carpet.

This second level was for the things that couldn’t be put into words—that Richard was afraid to put into words. Because that’s when it becomes real—not when you say it to someone else, but much, much earlier, when you admit it to yourself. And you’ve got to delay that for as long as possible.

_[Do you have weird dreams you can t talk about?](https://twitter.com/horse_ebooks/status/128881298382131200) _

Does everyone? Or just you? And how are you supposed to tell someone that last night you had a dream about him? You don’t, right?

Of course not. You don’t. Dreams are just—what are they—random synapse firings anyway; they don’t mean anything. Why are you letting this bother you? It was just a fucking dream.

“You OK?”

“What? Shit. Sorry, yeah, I am. Pass the milk?”

[ _Only an idiot would actually enjoy sweating and missing sleep and giving up_ ](https://twitter.com/horse_ebooks/status/208592720393019393)

but that’s what Richard did, all the time. He always enjoyed hanging out with Big Head—it was his favorite part of any day—but man, it made him feel like shit sometimes.

It wasn’t anything Big Head did. It was just Richard’s anxious brain, overanalyzing everything, assigning random value to the insignificant. Always in that incomplete-thought part of his brain there was this disjointed running commentary:  _am I staring at him? Am I lingering in this hug for too long? Am I leaning in too close?_ It was torture, but Richard was willing to endure it to be with his best friend, even if he was kind of the source of all this pain.

It didn’t make a lot of sense. He knew that. He knew it, but he never thought it.

_[we shall and we will and we will and we shall and we do and we care and we live and we love and we care and we shall and we care and we](https://twitter.com/horse_ebooks/status/217355506585579520) _

_—_ Another dream about Richard. Another dream, another daydream, another email draft deleted. Another night spent staring at the ceiling, another bite mark on his tongue.

Big Head had never kept a secret from Richard before, and it felt terrible. Richard was the only person he could talk to about something like this, and also the one person who could never find out.

_[Bear Stearns Bravo](https://twitter.com/Horse_ebooks/status/382505058962644993) _

“Shit, man, you hear about @Horse_ebooks?” said Big Head, shaking his big head. “Talk about a fucking letdown.”

“Oh, yeah, fuck, I read something about that,” said Richard. “That it’s just two guys promoting some weird ARG. Guess it was too good to be true.”

They said it almost in unison.  _“Everything happens so much.”_  But it wasn’t as funny now.

The account stayed up, but the Bear Stearns Bravo reveal had drained the fun out of it. There had been a strange pathos to the idea of a nascent AI, stumbling its way through the English language on spindly foal’s legs, inadvertently creating humor and beauty. It was a sacred thing for two small-town kids who felt they could never produce anything meaningful except by accident.

But @Horse_ebooks’ wisdom, as it turned out, was not an accident, not a miracle—just a calculated appeal to the Internet’s burgeoning taste for absurdism. And so it was quietly dropped from Richard and Big Head’s shared lexicon, becoming one of the many things neither of them would ever say.


End file.
